Diana Krall. Live at the Montreal jazz festival (2004)

Festival International de Jazz de Montrйal

The Festival International de Jazz de Montrйal (FIJM), (Eng: Montreal International Jazz Festival) also called "the Jazz Fest", is the largest jazz festival in the world.

The Festival

It is held annually in Montreal, Quebec during the summer season (usually at the end of June and the beginning of July) and gathers artists from around the world. It is typically attended by over 2 million people who are attracted by the electric atmosphere, diversity of shows and by the city itself. The festival reported on its website (below) in April 2008 that the attendance of the 2007 festival reached 2.1 million. Many parts of the city's downtown core are closed to traffic for ten days as outdoor shows are free to the public and on many stages at the same time, from noon till midnight. Attendance to some shows is over 100,000 and sometimes over 200,000.

Shows are held in a wide variety of venues, from relatively small jazz clubs to the large halls of Place des Arts. Some of the outdoor shows are held on cordoned-off streets while others are on terraced parks. Typically there are well over 500 concerts offered during the span of 10 days, from noon to midnight, about 350 of which are outdoors and free to the public.

History

The Montreal Jazz Festival was conceived by Alain Simard, who had spent much of the 1970s working with Productions Kosmos bringing artists such as Chick Corea, Dave Brubeck, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and others to Montreal to perform. In 1977, Simard teamed up with Andrй Mйnard and Denys McCann to form an agency named "Spectra Scиne" (now known as "L'Йquipe Spectra"), with the idea of creating a summer festival in Montreal that would bring a number of artists together at the same time.

They planned their first festival for the summer of 1979, but, unable to secure sufficient funding, their plans were scuttled, but they still were able to produce two nights of shows at Thйвtre-St-Denis, with Keith Jarrett and a then-unknown Pat Metheny.

The first Montreal jazz festival was in 1980, with funding from Alain de Grosbois of CBC Stereo and Tйlй-Quйbec. With Ray Charles, Vic Vogel, Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the bill, and an attendance of 12,000, the event was deemed a success, and has continued to grow since then.